We don't usually see yet another Brainfuck interpreter, or yet another Fibonacci queue implementation on HN's front page, so why LISP?
You know, we have the upvote arrow for things that excite you, and the “Go read something else and comment on it” feature for things that don’t float your boat.
Clearly this is not spam and it is not off-topic. So:
You asked the OP and/or your fellow HNers why they upvoted this onto the front page. I ask you, why this comment, what value does it add to my life to read about how smart and educated you are?
What about all the people who haven’t seen an implementation of McCarthy’s Lisp? Do they not deserve to find this interesting? Should they turn in their HN accounts and head over to reddit?
I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Yet I find this interesting. Is there something wrong with me?
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> I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff.
Greenspun’s Tenth Law is widely accepted, demonstrations of it in action add nothing of value to the programming community. Furthermore, writing a Scheme in Java is likely to be a project where you learned nothing of interest about Lisp or about Java.
—signed, Nikolai Bourbaki
In other words, "the complicated system you made _just happens_ to contain a Lisp, and if you had noticed that requirement in the first place its design would have been cleaner."
I have a motorcycle, but I'm still interested in not only other motorcycles, but also bicycles. I don't think this makes me a pretentious douche.
This project is exercising (proving? refuting?) that claim. I recognize that this isn't the most ambitious project in the world, but it was a Thanksgiving-weekend hack.
I'm thrilled that it got the 20 votes necessary to get it on the front page of HN.